Chapter Text
Izu isn't sure when the pain started. She's sure there must have been a time when she felt comfortable. When she was given hugs freely, without the fear of harming anyone. When she could hold her mother's hand and sleep peacefully through the night. But it's been so long now, the idea of comfort feels like a cruel dream.
Most nights she sleeps for maybe four hours before some odd pain wakes her and she has to get up and shift around to get it to quiet down. Sometimes it's a dull ache in her legs, other times it's a sharp stabbing in her shoulder blades. Then she spends her lonely days wandering the city looking for food or a new place to take shelter, never staying in the same place twice just in case. And all the while, she does her best to ignore the constant ache in her joints and stabbing in her muscles. Some days are worse than others, but she can always be sure something will be hurting. It's really the only constant in her young life.
Izu has just found a new place to take shelter, a small pallet of broken-down cardboard boxes next to a dumpster that doesn't smell too bad, and she pulls her thin jacket around herself as she lays her small, aching body down to try and rest. She’s barely slept three hours when her back begins to ache just a bit more than usual. Just enough to wake her up. She groans, but tries turning over, changing positions to something closer to comfortable. Then her right hip begins to hurt. It’s less of an ache and more of a deep pain, like someone pressing into her hip with all of their weight. She tries stretching her leg out but then the pain just begins shooting down her leg. Her left leg soon follows and now she knows she’s in a bad flare up. The only way to ease the now excruciating pain would be to give it to someone else, but she knows she can’t do that. Even if there was someone here, she could never force someone else to feel her pain.
The pain rises up her back and into her arms, causing her joints to ache and her muscles to burn. Her head begins to pound, a migraine forcing its way behind her eyes and soon enough she’s forced to curl in on herself to try and block out the stabbing sounds of the city streets. It all hurts and in so many flavors that she’s not even sure where she is anymore. She knows it will pass, but how soon is a mystery. She’s forced to just lay there and suffer as minutes turn to hours.
Evening turns to late night, the sounds of traffic and passersby trickling away in exchange for distant sirens and the occasional drunkard stumbling home. She barely has the mind to notice the change, pain forcing itself through every thought, so it’s no surprise that she misses the sound of the approaching stranger. He says something in a gravelly voice and a hand touches her thankfully covered shoulder. The tone grows more concerned as she doesn’t answer. Then she feels a hand on the bare skin of her neck and a minute amount of her pain leaves through the contact. The stranger shouts in pain, the hand leaving her neck, and she suddenly feels light. The pain is gone and she relaxes completely. But that wasn’t nearly enough of a discharge for her to be pain free. She knows it wasn’t. So why does she feel so okay? She is about to open her eyes when the moment of calm and relief ends and the pain comes back all at once. She lets out a small scream and then groans. She tenses all the way back up and curls further into herself.
A moment passes and she begins to think the stranger has left, but then the sound of a voice speaking urgently permeates the air. A loud, excruciating siren follows soon after and it’s all she can do to keep her head from exploding at the noise. She curls even further into herself and wishes it all away. There’s more talking and then the siren is gone. A small relief. Her shoulders untense just a fraction. Then she’s suddenly airborne and placed on something soft which moves her to a very bright place. Then she’s moving again, much faster now. Is she in a car? Something touches her bare hand, it feels like cloth but has the strength of a hand. She grips onto it without thinking. She moans and feels tears running down her face as whatever is carrying her hits a bump. The thing she is holding onto squeezes her hand and a voice begins whispering right next to her ear.
“Do you want me to take it away again?” Take it away? Can this stranger do that? She remembers faintly the calm moment only minutes earlier and nods ever so slightly. The pain is suddenly gone and she relaxes all at once. As the seconds pass, she feels sleep coming for her and grips tightly to the hand in hers, as it has to be a hand now that her mind is clear enough to process it, and allows herself to fall. The pain returns, she groans, but before she can fully tense back up, it’s gone again. This pattern continues until she is fully awoken by the combination of the pain returning fully and the soft thing moving out of the bright place into an even brighter place.
She is being moved quickly now and she feels all the pain of before along with all new kinds of pain, the flare up reaching a crescendo. She doesn’t even have the energy to cry, only holds even tighter to the hand until it is suddenly gone and she cries out at the loss of contact. Then there’s a new sharp pain and the world goes dark.
—
Izu awakes later to the sound of beeping and a dull ache in her joints. The flare up is over, thankfully, but where is she now? What’s beeping? Her memories of last night are clouded with pain, so she’s not sure exactly what happened. She opens her eyes slowly to find herself lying in a bed in a room she doesn’t recognize. She turns her head slowly to the side and finds the source of the beeping to be a machine beside her. Is she in a hospital? Her eyes leave the machine and fall on a man in dark clothes sleeping in a chair next to her. Who is he and why is he here?
The man suddenly looks up, wide awake, and startles Izu. He sits up fully and leans toward her. “How you feeling, Kid?” She recognizes that voice. Is this the stranger from last night? The one who temporarily took her pain away?
He’s still looking at her, so she clears her throat to answer him. “B-Better, thank you. Where am I?”
The man nods. “Good, I’m glad. You’re at Musutafu General, hero’s ward. I brought you in after I found you last night. What do you remember?”
“I was in a lot of pain, but it wasn’t anything that hasn’t happened before… Wait, did you say the hero ward?” Panic begins to settle in her bones. “I can’t be here! I’m not a hero and I don’t have any money to pay for the upgrade! I can’t even pay for the doctor! I-I-”
“Hey, slow down, it’s okay. You’re here because I’m a hero and I’m the one who called it in. You won’t be paying for anything. You’re just a kid. You can’t be older than seven or eight, so no one is expecting you to pay for anything.”
“I’m nine…”
The man actually smiles a little at that. “Okay, well they still don’t expect a nine-year-old to pay for medical expenses.” His smile falls. “You said this has happened before?”
Izu nods. “Yeah, my body always hurts, but sometimes it gets worse if I haven't given the pain to anyone else in a while.”
“Given the pain? What does that mean?”
Izu chews her lip for a second before explaining. “When I touch someone with my bare hand, I can give my pain to them. I can make them hurt. But I never do it except on accident! I can’t control it when the pain gets really bad, so if someone touches my skin, I hurt them, but I don’t mean to! I never mean to! I promise! Please believe me!”
He places a hand on hers. “I believe you, it’s okay. I understand that it can be hard to control, especially since you’re so young.” he rubs his thumb across teh back of her hand and she relaxes. “So are you always in pain?”
She nods. “Yeah, but I can handle it most of the time.”
“On a scale from one to ten,” he points at a chart on the wall with various smiley and frowny faces on it in various states of what she assumes is pain, “how would you describe your “normal” pain level?”
She squints her eyes at the chart. Chewing her lip she analyzes the poster and decides to be honest, even if he doesn’t believe her. No one ever believes her. “A six.”
The man sucks in a breath. Here it comes. He’s going to say that’s too high. That she must have misunderstood what he was asking. That’s what all the doctors said when her mommy used to take her to the doctor. That she can’t possibly be in that much pain all the time. Izu looks down at her hands as she waits for the inevitable.
“I’m sorry, Kid. That sounds like one heck of a quirk drawback.” Her head swivels to look at him in disbelief. He is already looking at her with sympathy in his dark eyes.
“You… You believe me?”
“Of course I do. Quirks are finicky things, so I have to trust you. Only you know how you feel.”
Tears well up in her eyes as she smiles at the man. “Thank you.”
He reaches out and ruffles her hair. “It’s literally the least I can do, Kid.”
She sniffles. “My name is Midoriya Izu.”
“Aizawa Shouta, hero name Eraserhead.” He reaches out a hand. She takes it and they shake hands. She laughs at the weirdness of it. Meeting a hero and shaking his hand.
The moment is broken by a doctor walking into the room. “Ah, you’re awake, good.” The doctor turns to Aizawa. “We ran every test we could and she appears to be perfectly healthy.”
“Other than the pain you mean.” Aizawa’s voice is hard, leaving no room for disagreement.
“Well, yes, except for that. But she seems to be feeling better now.” The doctor looks over at her and smiles. “How’s the pain now? Can you look at this chart and tell me?” She points at the same chart that Aizawa had Izu use earlier.
“A six.” Izu answers honestly.
The doctor frowns. “I don’t think you’re understanding the chart, Sweetie. See,” she points at the frowny face at six, “this would mean you were in a lot of pain right now. Too much to be relaxing and definitely too much to sleep. Are you sure it’s not more in this range?” She points to the smiley faces at zero, one, and two.
Izu shakes her head. “No, it’s a six. My back hurts, and my knees hurt, and my elbows hurt, and my head is still hurting, and my neck hurts, and just everything hurts. It’s a six. I’m just used to it now.” Izu shrugs, which flares the pain in her shoulders.
The doctor purses her lips. “Well that simply isn’t possible, Sweetie. There’s no getting used to a six.”
“She said it’s a six, so it’s a six. Why are you questioning her on this?” Aizawa asks the doctor sternly.
Izu cuts in before the doctor can answer. “It’s okay. No one ever believes me. You’re the first one since my mom.”
Aizawa looks at her, his eyes revealing that he’s calculating something. “I want to try something, to see if we can get her to believe you.” Izu tilts her head in question and so does the doctor. Aizawa turns to the doctor with a sickly grin. “Why don’t you shake her hand if you don’t believe her? She told me her quirk transfers her pain to others, so if she’s exaggerating her pain, then you should be able to shake her bare hand.”
Izu looks at Aizawa with wide eyes. “I can’t!”
Aizawa looks at her, his grin softening. “I promise, it’s only to help you. Give you permission.”
Izu looks at the doctor and then back to Aizawa. “Okay…”
“Well, if it will get you both to see reason, then it can’t really hurt anything.” She walks over to Izu and reaches out a hand for a hand shake. Izu looks at Aizawa for confirmation one more time before she takes the doctor’s hand and relaxes fully. The doctor’s eyes grow wide and she shouts in pain, her legs giving out. Izu immediately lets go, giving the doctor a chance to catch her breath. She looks up at Izu breathing heavily.
“That’s how it feels, only everywhere…” Izu tells her softly.
“Do you believe her now?” The doctor turns to Eraserhead and nods. “Good, then you need to do whatever you can to help her manage this. Now.”
The doctor scurries out of the room and Aizawa sits down at the end of her bed. “You did good, Kid.” He ruffles her hair and Izu smiles at the simple affection.
—
“Where am I going to go?” It’s been a few hours and Izu’s situation is really sinking in.
“What do you mean?” Aizawa looks at her with thinly veiled concern.
“I don’t want to go into foster care, but there’s not really anywhere else for me to go now that you’ve found me…”
Aizawa is silent for a moment, reaching out to card his fingers through her hair as he appears to think. Izu waits patiently, relishing in the careful affection since it will soon be gone once Aizawa is done with her. “If you don’t want to go into foster care, then what would you like?”
Izu chews her lip. ‘I was doing okay on my own. I can just go back to that…”
“No.” The fingers stop for a moment before they begin softly stroking her hair again. “No, that isn’t a good solution either.” They sit in silence for a time before Aizawa clears his throat, gaining her attention but refusing to look at her. “What if you came to stay with me?”
Izu stares at the man who saved her. Who believed her. Who risked the pain to help her. When she doesn’t speak, he looks over at her and finds tears in her eyes. “Do you mean it?”
His face softens. “I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
Izu sniffles and throws herself into his strong arms. He holds her close and rubs soothing circles in her back. Izu doesn’t know the last time she was this happy, but it’s definitely been since before her mother passed. But now she has a new parent and she will do whatever it takes to keep him.
—
They leave the hospital the next day with a list of medications to try and the number of a pain specialist to see.